Bringing Up Father — buf390509

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows the long-suffering Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie through four panels of domestic telephone comedy: Maggie spends hours trying to reach her son by phone, a telegram boy arrives with a collect wire, and the punchline reveals the son grabbed the baby's toy telephone by mistake. McManus draws his women with ornate hair and fashionable dress, his figures outlined in confident, fluid brushwork typical of early syndicated strips. Launched in 1913 by King Features, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first comic strips to achieve global syndication, its recurring characters and sequential panel grammar helping establish the visual conventions — speech balloons, reaction shots, rim-shot final panels — that newspaper dailies handed directly to the first comic books of the 1930s.